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Journalism of Courage
Celebrated French memoirist Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
In her books spanning over six decades, Ernaux has chronicled events in her life ranging from growing up as the daughter of grocers to getting an abortion before it was legalised in France. Through these, she has also captured the anxieties and prevailing issues of her generation.
Her win has now put the spotlight on memoirs as a literary genre, how they differ from autobiographies, and their importance in the cultural landscape. We explain:
A memoir is most easily defined as a non-fiction first-person narrative derived from the writer’s own memories and knowledge. It is generally supposed to recount a ‘slice of life’ and not an entire lifetime. Ideally, this slice would be about a particular aspect of or event in the author’s life that acts as the overarching theme in the narrative.
For example, American poet Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) depicts her childhood and adolescence, marked by sexual trauma and acts of racism. Another popular example is Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black (2010), which tells the story of the author’s year in prison after being convicted for drug trafficking and money laundering.
Though the terms are often used interchangeably, a memoir and an autobiography are distinctly different, but with a lot of overlap – both deal with facts, memories and personal knowledge of the author. However, one basic difference is that an autobiography covers the entire span of the author’s life till the time of writing, whereas a memoir, as mentioned above, is supposed to be a ‘slice of life’.
Another major difference is that an autobiography is usually written by an already famous or noteworthy person. A memoir, on the other hand, can be written by anyone with a story to tell. For example, Frank McCourt, an Irish-American teacher in New York City, wrote about his impoverished childhood in Angela’s Ashes, for which he later won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
Another difference is the style of writing usually seen in these genres. Autobiographies tend to highlight facts and the role played by the author in important historical events. Memoirs, meanwhile, place greater emphasis on the author’s interior journey, and are more introspective in nature.
Lastly, an autobiography is more often than not written in chronological order. Memoirs tend to have non-linear narration, with episodes from different parts of the author’s life woven in together. A good example is Korean-American musician Michelle Zauner’s book about dealing with the loss of her mother, Crying in H Mart (2021). It goes back and forth between moments in their relationship, along with scenes of grief and on coping with the death.
In his 2016 book The Rise of the Memoir, Alex Zwerdling (former Professor of English, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley) wrote that the focus on the private rather than the public life is key to understanding the wide appeal of memoirs.
He added that the emphasis is on “experiences we would rather keep to ourselves than acknowledge, yet feel reluctantly compelled to confess.” For Zwerdling, the impulse to write a memoir is also because of this aspect: “Shame, guilt, and secrecy work their way to the surface, in the hope that a sympathetic audience may emerge, and understand,” he said.
The accessibility that memoirs provide, of being true stories of everyday, ordinary people, is what explains their enduring appeal throughout the years. This is especially true in contemporary times, when there is a lot of effort being made to understand marginalised narratives and bring them into the mainstream.
A 2021 article in The New York Times says, “For those whose perspectives are missing in the canons and histories we learned in school — who have been long ensnared in the cultural narratives of those more powerful — the memoir has served as a site of redress, a space in which to turn the tables, to make their experiences visible and their stories heard: a passage not only into literature but into a larger acceptance.”
One of the most celebrated examples of this is Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) which explores the gender binary, what it means to be a trans or cisgender person, heteronormativity (the belief or attitude that being straight is the only normal and natural expression of sexuality), and the various forms that sexism and misogyny take.
Another example is Threading My Prayer Rug (2016) by Sabeeha Rehman, which deals with the author’s immigration to the US from Pakistan after marriage, and how she maintained her faith as a devout Muslim while embracing the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural landscape of her new country. It also talks about grassroots work to increase inter-faith understanding in a post-9/11 world.
Ernaux has long been celebrated for her simple, yet effective prose detailing with depth the various events in her life that shaped it. What sets her apart from most memoirists is her approach to exploring her own memories: she is acutely aware that they are not infallible, and thus, she distrusts her memory at every step, forever questioning and never settling on one truth.
An understanding of the role played by the historical and socio-political environment of the times she writes about is also central to her work. In this sense, her writings are more comparable to that of an archaeologist than a novelist— for her, fragments and relics of personal memory are crucial to piecing together the history of an individual, and through that, a society.
Even after Ernaux has published a memoir, she goes back to it and questions the truth of what she has written. “I am not trying to remember,” she writes in a 2020 article in The New Yorker. “I am trying to be inside… To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. To be in the pure immanence of a moment.”
